Mentoring primary-secondary teachers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: One program’s journey in designing learner-centered pedagogy

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teacher education

Proposal

My dissertation research is geographically situated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and focuses on a project-based, learner-centered pedagogy program at a semi-rural primary-secondary school in a long-term refugee community in Kinshasa Province. The program, funded and supported by a U.S.-based non-profit organization and administered by a Congolese non-governmental organization, highlights a teacher mentoring initiative in the form of weekly teacher learning circles (TLCs) with regular attendees including four core Congolese teachers and three in-country Congolese program facilitators. These TLCs function on a weekly basis to mentor the four teachers who are implementing and co-creating what the program states is an “experimental” learner-centered sustainability curriculum, which includes the establishment of a school-based learning garden to benefit both the school and the surrounding community. Since 2014, the same four teachers (two primary, two secondary) participating in the experimental curriculum have worked in conjunction with the in-country Congolese facilitators and three U.S.-based American program members (using Skype as a medium) to co-create the student-centered learning modules.

In recognizing that pedagogy is largely influenced by the social and material context and local perceptions of knowledge production and dissemination (Bhaba, 1984b), my qualitative case study, the case being the TLC initiative embedded within the program, is concerned with the following questions: How do TLCs promote teacher mentoring and learning in the given context? What do the teachers seem to understand about learner-centered pedagogy as a teaching and learning paradigm in primary and secondary schools in the DRC? International development projects in sub-Saharan Africa often lean toward Anglo-American “best practices” in teaching such as learner-centered pedagogy, which has become a kind of “globalized form of knowledge” (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2012). Cognizant of this, my research ultimately hopes to highlight how the long-term commitment of a small-scale teacher education program may interpret ways of localizing such pedagogy.

Using Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, I am exploring the degrees of participation and non-participation of the TLC participants in implementing and co-creating the program curriculum and negotiating knowledge and ideas about learner-centered pedagogy. In May 2018 I spent nearly one month focusing my attention on shadowing the four core teachers at the founding school of the program as they went about their daily teaching activities. I conducted several formal and informal interviews with each teacher, observed lessons using both the state government curriculum and the program’s sustainability curriculum, and observed their weekly TLC meetings at the school site. To triangulate my data, I supplemented individual interviews with focus group interviews and also interviewed each program facilitator to gain their perspectives and role in implementing the pedagogy. Lesson artifacts including teacher handwritten lesson plans and typed program learning modules are being consulted and analyzed as well as the teacher written reflections collected as part of the program’s ongoing evaluation process. I am working now to transcribe, code, and analyze the teacher and facilitator interviews (conducted in French), code and analyze my observation notes, and complete further interviews with the three American program committee members.

Author

• Jennifer Lund, Indiana University